"Sight alone teaches us that the various entities, the 'externals', strangers to each other, nevertheless exist together in an absolute way. This is simultaneity, a mystery that psychologists handle like a child handles explosives".
- The Eye and the Spirit, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Last September, Nerya Shohat, a video artist who lives and works in Berlin, returned to Jerusalem, his hometown, due to his mother's health condition. For many months he wandered in the caulking spaces of the hospital, in almost complete detachment from his day-to-day life. During the nights of last week, he stayed and created the exhibition in Beita gallery, which functioned as a temporary studio.
Strelitzia is the name of a plant species that symbolizes optimism, freedom and loyalty. In the solo exhibition Strelitzia Scope, Nerya Shohat examines the aesthetics of the fracture, through the analysis of random moments imposed by staying in a place where the sense of time and space is lost: a hospital.
Part of the artworks exhibited, present the views of the Judean Mountains that stretch through the windows of Hadassah Ein Karen Hospital in the gallery, which is located in the heart of a bustling urban center, as if asking the busy street to carry the geographical and emotional border. The street contains and responds to the wound with a one-time caress, embodied in alternating shadows on the surface of the artworks: a passing car, the light rail, the changing colors of the traffic light. Shadows of a life that passes in an instant.
The sound echoing in the space and unfinished objects he found in the gallery, mark the resonant body which appears at the heart of the exhibition, moving between the spaces in an interplay of space and time, swinging between the whole and the wound.
Nerya Shohat is a multidisciplinary video and installation artist, born in Jerusalem. Master's student of art and media at UDK University of the Arts Berlin.
Eles-Beck Stiftung Scholarship holder.
Bachelor's degree with honors, Department of Screen-based Art, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem.
In the years 2015-2019, he worked with the artist Penny Hes-Yasour, winner of the Arnold Bode Prize, as a main studio assistant and collaborator.
In 2017 he collaborated with the Gate 3 city gallery in Haifa, where, among other things, developed and presented the solo exhibition SEKSTANTIA.
Over the years he participated in several group exhibitions, independent productions and worked as co-creator, installation and space consultant in the fine arts field.